Hello everyone. I've been hitting a lot of conferences recently, and
found myself having the same discussion with multiple members of the
community. And many of them have 'heavily encouraged me' to bring this
discussion up here. And Julien's recent PHP6 email, reminded me that I
hadn't done so.
The short form is:
We should not name the next version of PHP: PHP6, for 2 reasons:
1. It will cause confusion in those least able to adapt
2. It costs us nothing, hurts us in no way, to name it something else
So let me get into some more details...
Right now, unfortunately due to various issues that we won't go into.
There are a lot of books on the market, on shelves in bookstores here in
the US, and online, that talk about PHP6. A quick search for PHP6 on
Amazon, brings up 6 books in the first page of results alone.
Yes, it sucks that this happened. Yes, it's stupid. Is it 'our'
(internals / core devs) fault? No. But the fact is that they exist,
and they are still out there.
Now what is going to happen, when 'average jane PHP developer' out
there. Finds out that PHP6 is released. Or someone who is going to be
brand new to learning PHP, and wants to make sure they are learning the
latest version ... What happens when that person decides they should buy
a book to learn PHP6? They will go to their local bookstore, or they
will go onto Amazon.com. And they will search for PHP6 ... and they
will find all of these books.
All of them being 100% completely incorrect. And not only useless to
these people, but actually damaging. Because these people relying on
the books to teach them what will be. Will think that they are being
taught proper PHP6. When it couldn't be further from the truth. (They
will be being taught PHP5.2-ish stuff, with unicode support that doesn't
exist).
You might not think that people would be so easily deceived. I'm here
to say, that people will be. I'm amazed weekly, if not daily. How I
continue to run into people who have been programming PHP for ten
years. Who have never connected to the community. Who don't know about
any of the resources, people, community that exists out there. PHP runs
80% of the web, and the 'community' that we always talk about, is
pitifully small in light of that.
There are 10's to 100's of thousands of PHP developers across the world,
who may be relying completely upon non-community sources. And who will
be directly confused by the naming of this product PHP6.
Is that 'our' fault? No, not at all.
But should we care? Yes. I think we should. These exact same people,
are crucial to the ecosystem. We want to make it easy for people to
pick up the language new, easy for people to transition to the new
version. We want to make sure that if there is ANYTHING that we can do,
that might ease some confusion or pain points. We do so. In fact it's
why this group is SO adamant about not introducing non-backwards
compatible changes in minor releases. Because we don't want to impact
all of those millions of projects out there that people just need to work.
And the fact is. This is a problem that we can solve right here. Right
now. With ZERO impact on us.
It costs us nothing, and doesn't hurt us, at all, to simply name this
next release something else. By simply changing the name, we suddenly
resolve all potential future confusion, not only confusion that we will
visibly see on twitter, message boards, email lists, etc.
But we will be able to alleviate the hidden confusion that we won't see
either (and which in turn, could hurt adoption of PHP6 as well).
And I'll state again - It costs us nothing to just put a different name
on this.
It's for exactly these reasons - Why I would urge this group to name the
next release something else. Call it PHP7 - Or call it anything else
that you want to: PHP-X, PHP 2014, PHP-A, PHP Leaping Leopard. That
part doesn't matter. What does matter is calling it something else, so
that confusion doesn't occur.
Thank you for your time,
Eli